Project Details
Timeframe: December 2014
Roles: Programmer, Conceptual and Visual Designer
Technical Implementation: JavaScript, p5.js
Music: “Waltz of the Stars” By Lee Rosevere
GitHub Repo
This project was created in collaboration with Jason Sigal at ITP – NYU
Star Trails is a music visualization that takes inspiration from long exposure timelapse photography of the night sky in which the light trails of stars record the rotation of the earth. Star Trail’s animated nighttime landscape is an abstract representation of music and a celebration of pattern and repetition. Over the course of Lee Rosevere’s “Waltz of the Stars”, a starry night sky is painted across the screen while lines undulate in an ocean-like pattern of waves.
“Waltz of the Stars” is analyzed using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). 512 stars are drawn over the course of the song, each star representing a different analyzed frequency wave. As the frequency of the stars change over time, the saturation, brightness and transparency of the star that is drawn also changes. The color of the ocean waves changes according to amplitude changes in the song.
Star Trails was built in collaboration with Jason Sigal, and uses a sound library Jason built for p5.js, an animation library for JavaScript.
